Want to totally start over on your WordPress website and restart your web design process from scratch? In this article, I show you exactly how to do that by re-installing WordPress within your hosting provider.
I’ll be using SiteGround for this particular article, who I highly recommend due to their easy WordPress hosting tools, responsive support team, and overall great customer experience.
The typical reason you may want to re-install the WordPress CMS on your website is that you tried out too many themes and/or plugins, and now all the content is jumbled together on your site. You’ve got tons of placeholder images and icons from various themes in your media files, messed up layouts across your webpages from conflicting theme installs, as well as unwanted plugins that were automatically installed and activated.
As a result, it’s easier to just wipe everything off your website domain and start again with a fresh WordPress install.
Important Note:
The methods discussed in this article will erase ALL your WordPress content. This includes deleting your blog posts, media (i.e. images and videos), webpages, and plugins. You can always use a site backup plugin to save your content either on your computer or in the cloud if you want to keep any of your content and rummage through it later. However, the point of this article is to totally start over and wipe everything on your current WordPress website.
Step 1: Access Your Site Tools
For starters, login to your host like SiteGround, GoDaddy, Bluehost, or wherever your WordPress website is hosted. In my case, I’ll be using SiteGround.
Navigate to the “Websites” section or tab where all your hosted website domains are listed (red arrow in the above image).
Find the domain/property where you’d like to re-install WordPress (outlined in green in the above photo), then click the button labeled “Site Tools” (red arrow).
Step 2: Delete Your Current WordPress Installation
Under the “WordPress” menu option of the main Dashboard from within Site Tools, click “Install and Manage” (red arrow in the image above).
Scroll down to the section of the page titled “Manage Installations.” You’ll see a small table with your domain name, the CMS that’s currently installed (in this case, WordPress), and the current version. Click the “Search Actions” menu icon (the little three dots – red arrow in the above image), then click “Delete Application” to delete WordPress from the Domain.
You’ll get a warning message letting you know that deleting your WordPress installation can’t be undone. You have two checkboxes that allow you to keep certain aspects of the backend of your site, including the database and staging copies. You can leave these boxes unchecked if you want to wipe everything from your WordPress installation.
Again, if you have content stored on your WordPress site that you don’t want to delete, go back and backup your website via a plugin before deleting WordPress. Otherwise, click “Confirm” (red arrow) to delete your WordPress installation and all the content within WordPress.
Step 3: Re-Install WordPress
After a moment, you’ll see a “Success” message in the upper right corner of the page (blue arrow in the image above). WordPress has now been deleted from your domain.
You can reinstall WordPress by scrolling up to the “Install New WordPress” section of the same page, then click the “Select” button under WordPress (red arrow).
Scroll down to fill out the new information for your WordPress website. The top fields (highlighted in green in the above image) can remain at their defaults (unless you want to set up a different language for your site other than English). Under the “Admin Info” section, you’ll need to type a new admin Username and Password (red arrows) to log in to the back end of your WordPress site. Plus, you’ll want to add your email (the last red arrow), which can also be used in place of your admin Username to login to the back end of your site.
Note: make sure your admin is set to something other than just “admin” to keep your site from getting hacked, and also ensure you set up a strong password. You can check out this WordPress article on my website for 5 easy WordPress security tips.
Under the “Add-ons” section, I typically leave the “Install with WordPress Starter” unchecked (blue arrow in the above image).
Once you’re ready, click the “Install” button (green arrow in the above image) to re-install the latest version of WordPress.
After a few moments, you’ll see a success message stating that WordPress has been installed on your site (outlined in green in the above image). You can now click “Admin Panel” to be taken to the WordPress Dashboard (shown in the photo below), or click “View Site” to get a live preview of your website.
You now have a clean slate and can start your web design process from scratch! I hope this makes it easy for you to get rid of the clutter from testing out various themes and plugins.
If you enjoyed this article, you can take a deep-dive into WordPress and learn how to design a website from start to finish in my WordPress Masterclass on Udemy! Or, you can check out my other WordPress articles on my website.
